Important Event Lessons You Can Learn From the Failed Fyre Festival

Over the last couple weeks, two documentaries have detailed the ill-fated Fyre Festival event: a music festival hosted by entrepreneur Billy Mcfarland and rapper Ja Rule in the Bahamas. Guests were promised a luxurious island experience, with beautiful outdoor cabanas, private suites, and top-notch musical acts. Some attendees paid up to $12,000 for tickets to the event, where they expected to mingle with models and celebrity influencers against a backdrop of white sand and clear waters.

Instead, the opposite
happened. The island was barren and isolated, no musical acts came to perform,
there were no cabanas or high-end cuisine, and soaked mattresses loitered the
floor. The event started off with a modest and grand vision, but simply wasn’t
executed accurately or on time. However, Fyre Festival provides several
important lessons that any business can learn when they’re hosting events on
their own. Here are a few:

Plan Ahead of Time

Proper event management is a must. With any event, early preparation is
necessary to achieve success. There’s a reason why business conferences are
planned 1.5-2 years in advance; same for weddings. Organizing vendors,
arranging speakers, booking venues, and much more all take weeks at a time.
Fyre Festival organizers failed to create a timeline that was realistic.
Furthermore, they failed to heed the advice of others who warned organizers
that they were working towards idealistic and impossible goals.

“Festival vendors
weren’t in place, no stage had been rented, transportation had not been
arranged,” said. Chloe Gordon, a talent producer who was hired to handle
planning and logistics. Gordon had been led to believe the team was much further
ahead in planning than they actually were.

“If Fyre Festival seemed
last-minute, that’s because it was,” additional sources told Vice. “McFarland thought of the idea in October 2016
and announced the festival on Instagram a month later, spending millions on
models, private jets, and yachts to promote what would be his first-ever
large-scale event.”

When working on an
event, it’s crucial to be realistic about your timeline. Hire organizers who
are efficient and have a portfolio of successfully planned events—and most
importantly, heed their advice when they tell you something isn’t going to work
out.

Build a Proper
Infrastructure

One of the biggest
reasons Fyre Festival failed dramatically was that they were unable to create a
proper infrastructure on the island. There were simply not enough toilets or
running water to accommodate the hundreds of people who had flooded in. “Any
time you’re putting on an event, it’s crucial to that you have the
infrastructure in place to suit it,” says Fix It Right, plumbers in Geelong. “All plumbing needs to be checked several
weeks ahead of the event to ensure everything is in working order in
preparation for that event.”

In this case, event
organizers failed to do this. The cost of sending toilets and showers to the
Bahamas for just the weekend was nearly $400,000. Ultimately, the organizers
couldn’t afford to set up bathrooms and build facilities; instead they arranged
port-a-potties, and had just three showers available for hundreds of guests.
The lack of running water, toilets, and showers wasn’t the only infrastructure
issue; there was also no electricity or WiFi available, as was guaranteed,
leaving many people stranded without a way to reach their friends and family.

Raise Your Money First

Another major reason
Fyre Festival failed was that they didn’t have enough capital. For starters,
money that they did have was squandered early on. The team spent over $1.5
million on influencer marketing alone, and had no solid system in place to
follow metrics or analyze the ROI they received from their extensive influencer
marketing campaign. However, even if they didn’t spend a dime on paying
influencers, they will would have come up astronomically short. Potential
investors warned Mcfarland that an event of his caliber would cost upwards of
$15 million, yet Mcfarland believed he could achieve it for much cheaper. In reality,
it would have costs nearly double that.

Always raise your money far in advance, and accommodate for unexpected
changes. Penny pinching a major event is never a good idea; accidents and last
minute changes are common in the event space. Start approaching investors early
on, and get an accurate valuation of your company. McFarland nearly raised $90
million from Comcast Ventures, but lost it merely because he failed to
accurately prove what his company was worth.

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Author: Eddy

Eddy is the editorial columnist in Business Fundas, and oversees partner relationships. He posts articles of partners on various topics related to strategy, marketing, supply chain, technology management, social media, e-business, finance, economics and operations management. The articles posted are copyrighted under a Creative Commons unported license 4.0. To contact him, please direct your emails to editor.webposts@gmail.com.
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